A Rape in Cyberspace.

A common misconception about virtual worlds is that they are solely for entertainment purposes. Virtual worlds do indeed have a great deal of an entertainment factor, but many people do invest a lot of emotion and valuable time to virtual worlds. Julian Dibbell, in the book, Crypto Anarchy, Cyberstates, and Pirate Utopias, touches upon the amount of real life emotion that does go into virtual worlds. In a chapter, involving a “rape in cyberspace”, a situation is described where a user in LamdaMOO uses sexual violence against users, and the emotional outrage that arises because of his actions.
After the events took place, many people were brought to the attention of the actions of the night before. One of the users took it upon herself to describe herself to describe her feelings after the occurrence and wanted to let it be known that she wanted vengeance taken upon her attacker. Dibbell contacted the woman months later and noted, “Months later, the woman in Seattle would confide to me that as she wrote those words posttraumatic tears were streaming down her face—a real-life fact that should suffice to prove that he words’ emotional content was no more playacting.” The quote above does a fantastic job to prove that virtual worlds are not just fun, and that many people do invest a lot of their emotions into their use. By inventing a character, and an identity, that identity often becomes more than just an avatar and it is difficult to just see the instances that occur in a virtual world as merely entertainment.
It is difficult for non-users, like myself, to understand the great deal of emotion that people put into their virtual worlds. I have started to understand, and I can definitely understand how a “rape” in cyberspace would be extremely emotional. Rape is not only a psychical act, but it is very emotional. If users invest a lot of their emotions into their virtual world, then an act such as rape would inevitably be traumatic.
So now for the tough part, thinking of a media example for this article….I mean really? C’mon Burcu, cut me some slack on this one. You already know this post is a 10.
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